Roni Masel works on Hebrew and Yiddish literatures and studies them in the context of modern Jewish history and culture in Eastern Europe, the history of reading and history of the book, and queer and postcolonial theory. Masel is currently completing a book manuscript titled Bad Readers: Misreading, Mistranslation, and Other Textual Malpractices in Hebrew and Yiddish, which explores Jewish literatures in Eastern Europe from the perspective of reading and para-literacy, nationalism and dissent. The book reflects on what it means to accuse someone of being a bad reader, how...
Tom McEnaney works on the history of media and technology, Argentine, Cuban, and U.S. literature, sound studies, linguistic anthropology, computational (digital) humanities and new media studies. He is the current Director of the Berkeley Center for New Media. He also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Spanish & Portuguese and serves on the Executive Board of...
Ramsey McGlazer writes about twentieth-century European and Latin American literature, film, and critical theory. He works in Italian, English, Spanish, and Portuguese, with research interests in poetry and poetics, politics and aesthetics, critical carceral studies, and feminist, queer, and psychoanalytic theory.
Eric Naiman – Slavic Languages and Literature (Russian) – works in the fields of ideological poetics, sexuality and history, Soviet culture, the gothic novel. Teaching and research interests include Nabokov, Platonov, Law and Literature, University Fiction, Dostoevsky and Bakhtin. His most recent book is Nabokov, Perversely. He is also the author of Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology, and the co-editor of two collections of articles: Everyday Life in Early Soviet Russia and The Landscape of Stalinism. His work has appeared in Comparative Literature,...
Beth Piatote is an associate professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California Berkeley. She is the author of two books: the scholarly monograph Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and the Law in Native American Literature (Yale 2013), which received honorable mention from the Modern Language Association for the 2014 Prize for Studies in Native American Literatures, Cultures, and Languages; and the mixed-genre collection, The Beadworkers: Stories (Counterpoint 2019), which was long-listed for the Aspen Words Literary Prize and the PEN/Bingham Prize for...
Miryam Sas’s research specializations include Japanese literature, film, theater, and dance; 20th century literature and critical theory (Japanese, French, English, German); and avant-garde and experimental visual and literary arts. She began as a scholar of the experimental arts of the early twentieth century with a focus on modernist poetics and literary theory in Japan and France, reflected in her first book, Fault Lines: Cultural Memory and Japanese Surrealism (...
In my scholarship, I seek to place antiquity in dialogue with modernity, defamiliarizing and destabilizing widely accepted critical positions by exploring the emancipatory potential of textual and visual form. Aristophanes and the Cloak of Comedy: Affect, Aesthetics, and the Canon(University of Chicago Press, 2016) theorizes the nexus between canonicity and sensory—especially haptic—materiality. On the threshold between critique and post-critique, my monograph, Archive Feelings: A Theory of Greek Tragedy (Ohio State University Press, “Classical Memories/Modern Identities...
Sophie Volpp is professor of East Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature. She works in Chinese literature of the 16th through 19th centuries, and is the author of Worldly Stage: Theatricality in Seventeenth-Century China (Harvard, 2011) and The Substance of Fiction: Literary Objects in China, 1550-1775 (Columbia, 2022). She has also translated the work of pre-modern women poets and dramatists. She is currently at work on two projects: a book about the efforts of the National Peiping Library (now the National Library of...
My research interests have focused on Anglo-American and European modernist fiction, literature and philosophy, novel theory, affect theory, visual culture, and aesthetics. More recently, my worked has also turned to contemporary literature, especially Asian American and Asian diasporic literature.
My first book, Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel, appeared in 2020 from the University of Chicago Press as part of the "Thinking Literature" series. It turns to some experiments of modernist form - by James, Proust, and, most centrally, Woolf - in order to reinvigorate...
